Photo taken on Oct. 2, 2021 shows a large sculpture newly decorated as part of a city-wide beautification campaign in the run-up to COP15 in Kunming, southwest China's Yunnan Province.(Photo: Xinhua)

 
After the adjournment of the week-long COP15 meeting on Friday afternoon, representatives and scholars attending the meeting said they expected the second part of the meeting next year to deliver a feasible global post-2020 biodiversity framework built on the political commitment and momentum formed this week.

Chinese Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu said all the tasks of the first part of the meeting have been fulfilled successfully, and the meeting was ambitious, pragmatic, efficient and productive. 

The meeting gathered a broad consensus and laid solid foundations for the formation of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, Huang said at a press conference on Friday night. 

The first part of the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP15, kicked off on Monday in Kunming, Southwest China’s Yunnan Province when participants reviewed the post-2020 global biodiversity framework to draw a blueprint for biodiversity conservation in the future. The second part, to be held in person in the first half of 2022, will see broad and deepened negotiations toward an ambitious and practical framework.

This first part of COP15 was about getting commitments and making sure there was proper momentum for next year, when part two of COP15 will be held, so that there can be a set of actionable targets, Alice Hughes from the Center for Integrative Conservation of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden under the Chinese Academy of Sciences told the Global Times on Friday.

Mohammad Nazrul Islam, minister and deputy chief of mission at the Bangladesh Embassy in Beijing told the Global Times on Friday on the sidelines of COP15 that there is really hope that the post-2020 framework will be realized.

He said that Aichi targets signed in 2010 were not actually achieved, and the planet cannot afford more failure, adding that finance and technology will be important for achieving the post-2020 targets. 
However, Hughes said forming a legally binding post-2020 biodiversity framework was not going to be easy as many countries will not want to be committed to something that contradicts their national laws, and she has heard long debates over just one word because words can have loaded meanings in different contexts.

Another challenge is that most global biodiversity is within developing countries that don’t have the capacity to conserve or the necessary funding, Hughes said. 

The Kunming Declaration on joint efforts to halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity was adopted by more than 100 countries during the COP15 meeting, and Hughes said that the declaration is “meant to be a statement of unity.”

One of the highlights of the Kunming Declaration was that it called for countries to protect and conserve 30 percent of land and sea areas through well-connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures by 2030.

However, some people from developed countries were asking for scaled-up action, but that is not pragmatic as we have to consider fairness, Islam said. 

He said the $233 million Kunming biodiversity fund established by China was really needed for developing countries, and he hopes countries like Bangladesh can benefit from it.
 
Developed countries should also contribute to the funds needed for achieving the post-2020 targets, since they have benefited from using biodiversity and resources from developing countries, Islam noted.